


Nothing In This World Is Safe

by cnoocy



Category: Varúð - Sigur Rós (Music Video)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 12:32:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18800422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cnoocy/pseuds/cnoocy





	Nothing In This World Is Safe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychomachia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/gifts).



It takes a whole day. Of course it does. We get up at dawn, when the snow lets up enough to see. Then the fastest walker goes for the site. Today that's me. I'm also the youngest; this is my first time. I take my light from next to the fire and begin the walk to the riverside and the cliffs. I don’t run. It’s like in the old nursery rhyme: nothing in this world is safe. But it’s more true here. The water in the river doesn’t freeze, even though the snow falls so hard overnight you can barely see. And it seeps into the fields, so they become swamps full of hidden pools. My light is still dark and cold so I use the dim sunshine to look out for them as I approach the cliffs. Once I get there, I walk up the slope carefully. The mountains are solid, but they’re not stable. Every so often the whole range shakes, and the sky seems to shift. It’s not a problem to stand on if you're careful, but it means we can't camp up here overnight. If we could, that would probably mean that we'd be doing this somewhere else.

As I climb the cliff, I see a flashing light from across the river. The first signaler from the western settlement is already there. I take up my position and start flashing my light. If one of the lights is warmed up then the others don’t take as long to catch. We don’t know why. Our ancestors didn't leave us that information. We know how to make the lights, but if we ever really understood how they work, that knowledge has perished along with how our ancestors got here. We know they came from another world. But we don’t know how they traveled here, and decided to settle on this world, where even the cold island life they were used to soon seemed easy. At first they called it Höfn but they changed that once they knew what they had. They had many skills, but foresight was not among them.

I'm pleased to see the other signaler here. If something had happened and they hadn't shown up, we would need to make more trips to complete the signal and find out what had happened. And we don't travel that much. Other than this journey every few years, I spend my days growing food and bartering it with my neighbors. The western settlement is a few days’ travel from here, more or less in the other direction from ours. I don’t know anyone in our settlement who has ever been there. But every thousand days or so, the lights go out, and a group from each place sets out for this one. We get here on the the same day, rekindle the lights, and go home. 

The clouds move slowly as I flash my light and wait for my companions. They take more time because they are doing all of the morning camping tasks. I get out those of by being the first up the cliff. When we’re having hot drinks and dinner back at camp late tonight, I will be very grateful to them. But now I worry a little that they ran into some problem that I didn't notice. I relax when the first one arrives, and then barely see the rest arrive as I work. It’s not easy to flash the lights. Whatever gives them their power, it’s not something that runs on its own as soon as you light it, like straw or peat. I know as well that my light is giving some of its power to get the other ones started on both sides of the river. I will be exhausted when we're done. Some of my friends will need to keep me awake until we get back to camp. 

Far below, the river splashes between the rocks. I've heard there are places you can ford it, but they are nowhere near here. It’s a lot deeper than it looks. Also a lot faster. We won’t be swimming across to exchange pleasantries with the other group of signalers. Even if we could, it will be even less safe to be here afterwards than it is now. Flying creatures find lights very interesting, and the things that glide through our night skies are large, carnivorous, and unafraid of any of our defenses. We'll be back at camp when they arrive, listening to them trying and failing to catch the lights.

The sky starts getting dark, and I briefly panic. Did I mess something up? Will we have to come back tomorrow with a more experienced leader? But as the last person starts their light flashing, the lights begin to catch on both sides of the river. I don't make a sound, but inside my heart, I'm singing. Their color changes, becoming much brighter, and they start to float in our hands. One by one, each of us releases their light, letting it lift itself into the air. We all watch the reflections in the water as the lights begin to rise into the sky together. They’re a single thing now, connected in some way that we don't understand. They’ll float directly above this spot, visible from as far away as our settlement, even in the daytime. We’ll use them to find our way back home from our camp. There are lights to the south of our settlement, above the volcano. We’ll keep those to our right and these new ones behind us, and we'll be able to walk straight to our settlement.

I’m one of the last to leave. As I back away from the side of the cliff, I think about our ancestors. They dreamed of bright shining cities like the ones they knew. But nothing in this world is safe, and even back then, their tools were not enough to make it safe. They could build in the less dangerous places, but any shining city would just become a shining place for the dangers of this world to gather. So they did the opposite. Everywhere people live on this world, they can look up and see a signal, not over the places where we live, but over the places that are most perilous. Thirteen lights shining together in the sky. They send the same message as the lighthouses we read about in old books from other worlds, books brought by our ancestors from their island home. The name they gave to our world when they renamed it. Warning. Caution. Varúð.


End file.
